On November 10 2014 we should be ready with an alpha version of the Recipe SEO plugin, which allows Ziplist import, rich snippet markup, recipe organization, “Save Recipe” and “Save to Grocery” features letting cooks take your recipes with them on mobile and tablet, and more.

At this writing, we invite WordPress experts (those comfortable making a backup of their blog data and restoring it if need be) to test out the pre-release version of the plugin. It will undergo a few more changes before being put into the WordPress plugin directory.

It will require familiarity with WordPress plugin manual installation, and you must first backup your blog’s mySQL database. We won’t be releasing it to the WordPress library until beta, planned for later in November; that won’t require any FTP access to your blog.

Release Notes

When you press “Import from Ziplist”, note that the process is one-way. So, be sure to make a backup copy of your WordPress database before choosing this option.It will go through your recipes that you added via the Ziplist plugin and create copies of the recipes in the new BigOven recipe plugin format. This allows you to search for the recipes in the “Recipes” menu item and insert or link to them anywhere.

We are not yet releasing this to the plugin directory — to install it, you’ll need to follow the manual-instructions method. It’s easy — essentially, you unzip the plugin files, connect to your site’s server using FTP, navigate to the wp-content folder within the WordPress installation for your website or blog, find the wp-content/plugins directory, and place the folder there. That’s it!

Reporting bugs and feature suggestions

We certainly want to know any bugs you find, with specific information on your WordPress installation (version, platform) and steps to reproduce the problem.

In addition to bugs, we’d love to understand what would make it the best plugin for you as a food blogger. What would you like to see that would make your life easier, or your readers happier? On the list: print-friendly formatting and a few other features — but what’s on your list? Help us prioritize our work. Let us know.

BigOven is a partner with, not competitor to you as a food blogger. BigOven is not a food blog. We aim to surface some of the best content on the web — including but not solely those recipes already contributed to BigOven — as part of our job.

But our main goal is to provide consumers and the larger cooking-at-home ecosystem with tools that they can use to make their lives easier, healthier or more fun. We’re a software company building a great platform and productivity tool — a mobile and web-based system that’s used in the daily cooking life-cycle of the home cook, from ideation and discovery through (optional) planning, shopping, preparation and sharing.

2) BigOven is a software platform with a mission of making the lives of home cooks easier.

Our goal is to be the most-used, best-loved tool for home cooks. We make apps, a website, and an optional Kitchen Cloud API that all work together.

We put our emphasis on the software tools that help ease the cooking life-cycle. Food blogs are where a lot of the best ideas, photos and fresh perspectives come from in the food world. BigOven’s heritage and focus is making great software, specifically platform software — and our competitive lens is to take a look at the world of the home cook (and by extension those who help the home cook) and then ask the question “what can we do with mobile, the cloud and the web to make their lives easier, more fun, more healthy?”

At BigOven, we are also home cooks ourselves.

3) BigOven offers optional ways for bloggers to promote their content. When we do so, we give full credit and traffic to the author(s) and originating site.

Two examples of this can be seen in the Recipe Clipper and the curated Recipe Collections. Recipe Clipper is our tool that lets cooks snip a copy of a recipe and keep it in their own collection — it stays private, only to them, and carries with it a link back to the original source. (While in some cases, for paying Pro members it does make a copy of the preparation instructions, we are removing this feature in the near future and replacing it solely with a link to the original source; this change should go out in the next two months.)

BigOven helps integrate your content and your material into the life-cycle of the home cook.

Recipe Collections are designed to showcase some of the best seasonal recipes found on the web as well as in the BigOven archive. When one of our editors finds a great, seasonal recipe to feature in a Recipe Collection, we provide links back to original source with full “link juice” to credit the author for their work. We do not believe in framing other content. We do highlight what we discover, but will always endeavor to send the reader to the original source for the complete recipe.

For instance, our editor is highlighting Grilled Chicken with Pineapple Salsa in the “Grilled Main Dishes” collection. On the BigOven website, a hero photo and ingredients are there, but there is a full-link-juice link to visit Confections of a Foodie Bride for the instructions as to how to make the recipe. We highlight this recipe as a recommended recipe in the “Grilled Main Dishes” collection on the BigOven app and BigOven sites. (Food bloggers, we’re always looking for ways to improve — if you have suggestions that work even better for you, please let us know. Thanks!)

4) BigOven will never knowingly steal content, nor do we condone the theft of original material. We recognize your content is your own, that you have commercial interests in protecting that content and presenting it in the best possible light as the original source.

Food bloggers make people happy, are a source of inspiration for many, and bring people together. They make our lives as cooks easier and more successful, and as a food blogger, you rightly, fully own the content that you create.

We love food bloggers, consider them allies in the effort to get more cooks making more successful meals more often. As a food blogger, your content is and will always be your own, and belongs permanently to you.

Backing up this pledge — we warn cooks adding recipes to the archive not to post third-party content, and we have an easy DMCA takedown process (see the “Alert Editor” link on every recipe page) that is always acted upon within one business day of receipt. We also review all photos submitted to the site to help minimize the re-transmission of copyrighted material. Now, we cannot guarantee that content copying never happens, because despite our strong suggestions to cooks, sometimes some get through — but we act immediately if an original author contacts us through the “Alert Editor” button.

5) We’re listening.

We have a comments form, and our development team reads every single suggestion that comes in.

At BigOven, we’re working on a WordPress plugin for food bloggers that will let you create recipes in rich-snippet format, provide “save recipe” and “make grocery list” features for your readers, and more.

Optional “Save Recipe” button, allowing cooks to save the recipe for later and/or add items to a mobile grocery list

Soon after that, we’ll be prioritizing print-friendly recipe formatting and features we hear from you. We expect this plugin to be free, and will fully support WordPress 3.x and 4.0 and beyond. We have a lot of features in our Kitchen Cloud platform that can take the tech-drudgery out of being a great food blogger.

What’s in it for us?

We want all food bloggers to know about BigOven and help us surface some of the best recipe ideas on the web. And we we want even more consumers to use our easy recipe organizer for iPhone, iPad, Android and Windows Phone.

BigOven’s free mobile recipe organization and grocery apps, now with more than 11 million downloads and approaching 3 million registered users, each earn better than 4-out-of-5 star ratings on the major app stores, and we’re constantly improving them. The recipe organizer is already pretty feature-rich, with an easy grocery list, recipe clipper, menu planner, and recipe dashboard. Additional grocery list and recipe organizing features are on their way.